Joy and rage meet in Anger, the second EP of sibling duo Too Attached

Nor do they seem to be in the throes of “racialized rage,” although the press release for the EP suggests that was a major inspiration for the six songs, including the title track.

In fact, the colourful photo shows the duo laughing, looking more joyous than angry.

But anger can be a complicated thing. Even as Shraya sings “every day I wake with so much rage,” over a pulsing electronic beat, the sentiments are not black and white.

“Anger, like so many emotions, you can’t go around it,” says Shraya, in a phone interview from her home in Calgary. “Suppressing it doesn’t make it go away. In fact, I think there is actually an incredible joy that comes from releasing and saying ‘I’m angry.’ Playing that song live, it’s less about being rageful on stage and more about it being a joy to just release.”

In fact, Shraya jokes that she wants to be viewed as “the brown Courtney Love,” delivering a volatile recipe of rage, joy and angst.

“I just remember being in Edmonton and putting on (Hole’s) Live Through This and cranking it and just feeling ‘Yes, I can be angry’ and feeling teenage angst to the max,” she says. “For me, I wanted to make that record for people of colour to put on and think ‘Yes, I’m angry and that anger is being heard.’ ”

Too Attached do not sound all that much like Courtney or Hole, of course. While Angry moves away from the largely sample-based sounds of the duo’s debut, Bronze, it is still filled with pop hooks and infectious dance beats that add a sweet surface to what are often overtly politically lyrics.

Part of that is no doubt a reflection of Shraya and Bilgi’s shared musical evolution growing up in Edmonton, where they got their first taste of performance singing devotional Hindu songs together before moving onto pop, soul and R & B. Fifteen years ago, Shraya moved to Toronto to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and has released a number of solo records, including 2017’s Part-Time Woman. But, partly through necessity and partly through artistic restlessness, Shraya became a multi-disciplinary artist whose work has since expanded to novels, short stories, poetry, visual arts and films, all of which often have issues of race, gender and sexuality. In 2016, at the age of 35, she came out as transgendered.

A year earlier, Shraya and Bilgi, a beatboxer and producer who has toured with Method Man & Redman and Tanya Tagaq, decided to make their off-and-on collaborations more formal with Too Attached. They released their debut EP and supported Tegan and Sara on their 2016 Love You to Death tour across Canada. That year, Shraya also released the book, even this page is white, her debut collection of poetry, and The Boy & The Bindi, a picture book about a boy’s fascination with the dot on his mother’s forehead. In 2017, she released the short film, I want to kill myself, in which she explored her own suicidal thoughts.

Three months ago, she joined the University of Calgary faculty to teach creative writing. It’s an impressive and eclectic body of work and moving between disciplines has had a major impact on her approach to songwriting.

“I got really into storytelling in those mediums and so when I came back to music I thought ‘how do I apply those same principles of storytelling to albums?’ — something I had never really done,” says Shraya, who will join Bilgi at Calgary’s Nite Owl on March 3 for a CD release party. “The songs I had written before were about love and relationships and all that good stuff, but I thought ‘are there other stories that were worth telling?’ With this album, we wrote it largely in a post-Trump climate. American politics definitely does trickle into Canada politics, so the narrative of racialized rage and the ways that people of colour have to be polite or suppress our emotions, that became the underlying theme of the album.”

Politics and social issues that surround the LGBT community and people of colour often play into Shraya’s work. Even when they don’t, people often assume they do. In 2014, she wrote an essay for the National Post asking the question “why can’t brown people and queer people write about issues beyond being brown and queer?”

“It’s complicated,” she says. “I think that when you are a marginalized identity, there is both a pressure to write about those identities and also your work is always seen through that lens. I made a short film last year and it was about mental health and my relationship to thinking about suicide, and all the articles were like ‘Trans artist talks about mental health.’ I never talk about being trans in the film, but that’s the lens in which the work is viewed through. But with the context of this album, it also feels important to be talking about these issues as well. I think it’s a tough balance where there’s definitely pressure to talk about oppression and identities.

“I went to a poetry reading in Toronto and some guy got in and read a poem about his lawn blower,” she adds with a laugh. “I just thought, wow, I can’t imagine the freedom to write about a lawn blower.”

But while Shraya’s experiences growing up gay and becoming transgender relatively late in life may have played a role in politicizing her, she says she never felt any oppression from her religion in Edmonton. In fact, it was the opposite. In the Hinduism Shraya grew up in, the male gods “have long hair, are very pretty and all their friends are girls.”

“All these stereotypes about queer males in North America that are seen as negative, in Hinduism they are seen as godly,” she says. “As a queer kid growing up in Edmonton, queer male gods were kind of my first role models. Liking to dance, liking to sing; in my school these were things that were seen as feminine and negative. But in the context of my religious organization, they were actually seen as holy. I think having that foundation and that safety was crucial to survival of my teenage years.”

Femme Wave presents Too Attached, Cartel Madras and Hymn at the Nite Owl on March 3 at 9 p.m.

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